The transfer of sensitive corporate data outside of corporate-controlled infrastructures to external network accessible applications is a high security risk. For example, it is very common for employees to access external social networking web applications. These applications not only send information to the user's client device, but also attempt to obtain information from the client device, either by user input or by the application's access to the client device's information. The challenge to IT departments is to not only prevent malware from being downloaded to corporate client devices, but to prevent company and employee information from being transmitted outside of the corporate infrastructure.
Current solutions for providing IT departments with some type of security safeguards that help prevent such sensitive data transfers require a manual specification of URLs or manual configuration of methods that are used to upload data in order to enable blocking of such requests by a proxy. These manual approaches do not allow for security systems to dynamically adapt to new and differing external network accessible applications as well as changes to existing applications, e.g., adapting to new URLs that are added to an existing application, etc.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section. Similarly, issues identified with respect to one or more approaches should not assume to have been recognized in any prior art on the basis of this section, unless otherwise indicated.